OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Signature Correction Attack on Dilithium Signature Scheme
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Motivated by the rise of quantum computers, existing public-key cryptosystems are expected to be replaced by post-quantum schemes in the next decade in billions of devices. To facilitate the transition, NIST is running a standardization process which is currently in its final Round. Only three digital signature schemes are left in the competition, among which Dilithium and Falcon are the ones based on lattices. Classical fault attacks on signature schemes make use of pairs of faulty and correct signatures to recover the secret key which only works on deterministic schemes. To counter such attacks, Dilithium offers a randomized version which makes each signature unique, even when signing identical messages. In this work, we introduce a novel Signature Correction Attack which not only applies to the deterministic version but also to the randomized version of Dilithium and is effective even on constant-time implementations using AVX2 instructions. The Signature Correction Attack exploits the mathematical structure of Dilithium to recover the secret key bits by using faulty signatures and the public-key. It can work for any fault mechanism which can induce single bit-flips. For demonstration, we are using Rowhammer induced faults. Thus, our attack does not require any physical access or special privileges, and hence could be also implemented on shared cloud servers. We perform a thorough classical and quantum security analysis of Dilithium and successfully recover 1,851 bits out of 3,072 bits of secret key $s_1$ for security level 2. The lattice strength against quantum attackers is reduced from $2^{128}$ to $2^{81}$ while the strength against classical attackers is reduced from $2^{141}$ to $2^{89}$. Hence, the Signature Correction Attack may be employed to achieve a practical attack on Dilithium (security level 2) as proposed in Round 3 of the NIST post-quantum standardization process.
Lodestar: An Integrated Embedded Real-Time Control Engine
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

In this work we present Lodestar, an integrated engine for rapid real-time control system development. Using a functional block diagram paradigm, Lodestar allows for complex multi-disciplinary control software design, while automatically resolving execution order, circular data-dependencies, and networking. In particular, Lodestar presents a unified set of control, signal processing, and computer vision routines to users, which may be interfaced with external hardware and software packages using interoperable user-defined wrappers. Lodestar allows for user-defined block diagrams to be directly executed, or for them to be translated to overhead-free source code for integration in other programs. We demonstrate how our framework departs from approaches used in state-of-the-art simulation frameworks to enable real-time performance, and compare its capabilities to existing solutions in the realm of control software. To demonstrate the utility of Lodestar in real-time control systems design, we have applied Lodestar to implement two real-time torque-based controller for a robotic arm. In addition, we have developed a novel autofocus algorithm for use in thermography-based localization and parameter estimation in electrosurgery and other areas of robot-assisted surgery. We compare our algorithm design approach in Lodestar to a classical ground-up approach, showing that Lodestar considerably eases the design process. We also show how Lodestar can seamlessly interface with existing simulation and networking framework in a number of simulation examples.
Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are very popular frameworks for generating high-quality data, and are immensely used in both the academia and industry in many domains. Arguably, their most substantial impact has been in the area of computer vision, where they achieve state-of-the-art image generation. This chapter gives an introduction to GANs, by discussing their principle mechanism and presenting some of their inherent problems during training and evaluation. We focus on these three issues: (1) mode collapse, (2) vanishing gradients, and (3) generation of low-quality images. We then list some architecture-variant and loss-variant GANs that remedy the above challenges. Lastly, we present two utilization examples of GANs for real-world applications: Data augmentation and face images generation.
Learning Robust Real-Time Cultural Transmission without Human Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Cultural transmission is the domain-general social skill that allows agents to acquire and use information from each other in real-time with high fidelity and recall. In humans, it is the inheritance process that powers cumulative cultural evolution, expanding our skills, tools and knowledge across generations. We provide a method for generating zero-shot, high recall cultural transmission in artificially intelligent agents. Our agents succeed at real-time cultural transmission from humans in novel contexts without using any pre-collected human data. We identify a surprisingly simple set of ingredients sufficient for generating cultural transmission and develop an evaluation methodology for rigorously assessing it. This paves the way for cultural evolution as an algorithm for developing artificial general intelligence.
Multi-level Coordinated Energy Management for Energy Hub in Hybrid Markets with Distributionally Robust Scheduling
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2022
Year: 2022

Maintaining energy balance and economical operation is significant for multi-energy systems such as the energy hub. However, it is usually challenged by the frequently changing and unpredictable uncertainties at different timescales. Under this scope, this paper investigates the coordinated energy management problem for day-ahead and intra-day conditions considering uncertainties of source-load and market prices concurrently. Note that the precise knowledge of distributions about uncertainties may be unaccessible before the decision-making in day-ahead phase. A two-stage chance-constrained model based on distributionally robust approach with ambiguous moment information is proposed to immunize scheduling strategies against the worst-case probability distributions. The first stage is dedicated to obtaining more energy arbitrage and operation flexibility by optimizing bidding strategies in day-ahead power, natural gas and carbon markets. The second stage focuses on the optimization of worst-case expected operation cost. It provides a robust energy equipment and load scheduling strategy for the reference of subsequent intra-day arrangements. With respect to different variations of electrical and thermal components, an intra-day two-timescale coordination is implemented step by step. The energy scheduling is re-dispatched circularly to minimize the operation and penalty costs. The possible energy imbalance is also compensated by this way. As the energy management program is nonlinear, chance-constrained and multi-stage, linearization and dual transformation techniques are designed to enhance tractability of programs. Experimental results show that the developed multi-level framework results in a carbon emission decrease of 37%, and reduces energy cost averagely 3% compared with corresponding contrasting cases. The obtained strategy validates a good tradeoff between robustness and optimality.
FlexKeys: Rapidly Customizable 3D Printed Tactile Input Devices with No Assembly Required
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Physical input devices serve as a tactile interface between users and computing systems. These devices are often complex assemblies that consist of both electrical and mechanical components making customization difficult and out of reach for non-engineers. While these components can now be 3D printed on demand, they must still be independently designed and assembled. We present FlexKeys, an approach in which devices that include both electrical and deformable components can be created in a single print on a multi-material 3D printer, requiring no assembly. Designers can customize devices including the input type, travel distance and layout of keys, textures of surfaces, and route all electrical signals directly to a microcontroller socket. In many instances, these devices require no support material, producing a functional device the moment a print finishes. We demonstrate this approach by creating a customized keyboard and report on validation measurements of individual input keys as well as highlighting additional designs. This work provides the first step towards lowering the barrier to entry for non-engineers to design custom tactile inputs, enabling occupational and physical therapists, clinicians, and educators to design and create devices directly based on their assessments of individual user needs.
Multi-Sentence Knowledge Selection in Open-Domain Dialogue
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Incorporating external knowledge sources effectively in conversations is a longstanding problem in open-domain dialogue research. The existing literature on open-domain knowledge selection is limited and makes certain brittle assumptions on knowledge sources to simplify the overall task (Dinan et al., 2019), such as the existence of a single relevant knowledge sentence per context. In this work, we evaluate the existing state of open-domain conversation knowledge selection, showing where the existing methodologies regarding data and evaluation are flawed. We then improve on them by proposing a new framework for collecting relevant knowledge, and create an augmented dataset based on the Wizard of Wikipedia (WOW) corpus, which we call WOW++. WOW++ averages 8 relevant knowledge sentences per dialogue context, embracing the inherent ambiguity of open-domain dialogue knowledge selection. We then benchmark various knowledge ranking algorithms on this augmented dataset with both intrinsic evaluation and extrinsic measures of response quality, showing that neural rerankers that use WOW++ can outperform rankers trained on standard datasets.
VOLCANO: Detecting Vulnerabilities of Ethereum Smart Contracts Using Code Clone Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Ethereum Smart Contracts based on Blockchain Technology (BT) enables monetary transactions among peers on a blockchain network independent of a central authorizing agency. Ethereum Smart Contracts are programs that are deployed as decentralized applications, having the building blocks of the blockchain consensus protocol. This enables consumers to make agreements in a transparent and conflict-free environment. However, there exist some security vulnerabilities within these smart contracts that are a potential threat to the applications and their consumers and have shown in the past to cause huge financial losses. This paper presents a framework and empirical analysis that use code clone detection techniques for identifying vulnerabilities and their variations in smart contracts. Our empirical analysis is conducted using the Nicad code clone detection tool on a dataset of approximately 50k Ethereum smart contracts. We evaluated VOLCANO on two datasets, one with confirmed vulnerabilities and another with approximately 50k random smart contracts collected from the Etherscan. Our approach shows an improvement in the detection of vulnerabilities in terms of coverage and efficiency when compared to two of the publicly available static analyzers to detect vulnerabilities in smart contracts. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that uses a clone detection technique to identify vulnerabilities and their evolution in Ethereum smart contracts.
Enhanced Nearest Neighbor Classification for Crowdsourcing
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

In machine learning, crowdsourcing is an economical way to label a large amount of data. However, the noise in the produced labels may deteriorate the accuracy of any classification method applied to the labelled data. We propose an enhanced nearest neighbor classifier (ENN) to overcome this issue. Two algorithms are developed to estimate the worker quality (which is often unknown in practice): one is to construct the estimate based on the denoised worker labels by applying the $k$NN classifier to the expert data; the other is an iterative algorithm that works even without access to the expert data. Other than strong numerical evidence, our proposed methods are proven to achieve the same regret as its oracle version based on high-quality expert data. As a technical by-product, a lower bound on the sample size assigned to each worker to reach the optimal convergence rate of regret is derived.
Image analysis for automatic measurement of crustose lichens
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Lichens, organisms resulting from a symbiosis between a fungus and an algae, are frequently used as age estimators, especially in recent geological deposits and archaeological structures, using the correlation between lichen size and age. Current non-automated manual lichen and measurement (with ruler, calipers or using digital image processing tools) is a time-consuming and laborious process, especially when the number of samples is high. This work presents a workflow and set of image acquisition and processing tools developed to efficiently identify lichen thalli in flat rocky surfaces, and to produce relevant lichen size statistics (percentage cover, number of thalli, their area and perimeter). The developed workflow uses a regular digital camera for image capture along with specially designed targets to allow for automatic image correction and scale assignment. After this step, lichen identification is done in a flow comprising assisted image segmentation and classification based on interactive foreground extraction tool (GrabCut) and automatic classification of images using Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) for image segmentation and Support Vector Machines (SV) and Random Forest classifiers. Initial evaluation shows promising results. The manual classification of images (for training) using GrabCut show an average speedup of 4 if compared with currently used techniques and presents an average precision of 95\%. The automatic classification using SLIC and SVM with default parameters produces results with average precision higher than 70\%. The developed system is flexible and allows a considerable reduction of processing time, the workflow allows it applicability to data sets of new lichen populations.
Privacy of Fitness Applications and Consent Management in Blockchain
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

The rapid advances in fitness wearable devices are redefining privacy around interactions. Fitness wearables devices record a considerable amount of sensitive and private details about exercise, blood oxygen level, and heart rate. Privacy concerns have emerged about the interactions between an individual's raw fitness data and data analysis by the providers of fitness apps and wearable devices. This paper describes the importance of adopting and applying legal frameworks within the fitness tracker ecosystem. In this review, we describe the studies on the current privacy policies of fitness app providers, heuristically evaluate the methods for consent management by fitness providers, summarize the gaps identified in our review of these studies, and discuss potential solutions for filling the gaps identified. We have identified four main problems related to preserving the privacy of users of fitness apps: lack of system transparency, lack of privacy policy legibility, concerns regarding one-time consent, and issues of noncompliance regarding consent management. After discussing feasible solutions, we conclude by describing how blockchain is suitable for solving these privacy issues.
Code Smells in Machine Learning Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

As Deep learning (DL) systems continuously evolve and grow, assuring their quality becomes an important yet challenging task. Compared to non-DL systems, DL systems have more complex team compositions and heavier data dependency. These inherent characteristics would potentially cause DL systems to be more vulnerable to bugs and, in the long run, to maintenance issues. Code smells are empirically tested as efficient indicators of non-DL systems. Therefore, we took a step forward into identifying code smells, and understanding their impact on maintenance in this comprehensive study. This is the first study on investigating code smells in the context of DL software systems, which helps researchers and practitioners to get a first look at what kind of maintenance modification made and what code smells developers have been dealing with. Our paper has three major contributions. First, we comprehensively investigated the maintenance modifications that have been made by DL developers via studying the evolution of DL systems, and we identified nine frequently occurred maintenance-related modification categories in DL systems. Second, we summarized five code smells in DL systems. Third, we validated the prevalence, and the impact of our newly identified code smells through a mixture of qualitative and quantitative analysis. We found that our newly identified code smells are prevalent and impactful on the maintenance of DL systems from the developer's perspective.
Hybrid Optimized Deep Convolution Neural Network based Learning Model for Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Object identification is one of the most fundamental and difficult issues in computer vision. It aims to discover object instances in real pictures from a huge number of established categories. In recent years, deep learning-based object detection techniques that developed from computer vision have grabbed the public's interest. Object recognition methods based on deep learning frameworks have quickly become a popular way to interpret moving images acquired by various sensors. Due to its vast variety of applications for various computer vision tasks such as activity or event detection, content-based image retrieval, and scene understanding, academics have spent decades attempting to solve this problem. With this goal in mind, a unique deep learning classification technique is used to create an autonomous object detecting system. The noise destruction and normalising operations, which are carried out using gaussian filter and contrast normalisation techniques, respectively, are the first steps in the study activity. The pre-processed picture is next subjected to entropy-based segmentation algorithms, which separate the image's significant areas in order to distinguish between distinct occurrences. The classification challenge is completed by the suggested Hybrid Optimized Dense Convolutional Neural Network (HODCNN). The major goal of this framework is to aid in the precise recognition of distinct items from the gathered input frames. The suggested system's performance is assessed by comparing it to existing machine learning and deep learning methodologies. The experimental findings reveal that the suggested framework has a detection accuracy of 0.9864, which is greater than current techniques. As a result, the suggested object detection model outperforms other current methods.
A Learning Based Framework for Handling Uncertain Lead Times in Multi-Product Inventory Management
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Most existing literature on supply chain and inventory management consider stochastic demand processes with zero or constant lead times. While it is true that in certain niche scenarios, uncertainty in lead times can be ignored, most real-world scenarios exhibit stochasticity in lead times. These random fluctuations can be caused due to uncertainty in arrival of raw materials at the manufacturer's end, delay in transportation, an unforeseen surge in demands, and switching to a different vendor, to name a few. Stochasticity in lead times is known to severely degrade the performance in an inventory management system, and it is only fair to abridge this gap in supply chain system through a principled approach. Motivated by the recently introduced delay-resolved deep Q-learning (DRDQN) algorithm, this paper develops a reinforcement learning based paradigm for handling uncertainty in lead times (\emph{action delay}). Through empirical evaluations, it is further shown that the inventory management with uncertain lead times is not only equivalent to that of delay in information sharing across multiple echelons (\emph{observation delay}), a model trained to handle one kind of delay is capable to handle delays of another kind without requiring to be retrained. Finally, we apply the delay-resolved framework to scenarios comprising of multiple products subjected to stochasticity in lead times, and elucidate how the delay-resolved framework negates the effect of any delay to achieve near-optimal performance.
An Effective Way for Cross-Market Recommendation with Hybrid Pre-Ranking and Ranking Models
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

The Cross-Market Recommendation task of WSDM CUP 2022 is about finding solutions to improve individual recommendation systems in resource-scarce target markets by leveraging data from similar high-resource source markets. Finally, our team OPDAI won the first place with NDCG@10 score of 0.6773 on the leaderboard. Our solution to this task will be detailed in this paper. To better transform information from source markets to target markets, we adopt two stages of ranking. In pre-ranking stage, we adopt diverse pre-ranking methods or models to do feature generation. After elaborate feature analysis and feature selection, we train LightGBM with 10-fold bagging to do the final ranking.
Do Prompts Solve NLP Tasks Using Natural Language?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Thanks to the advanced improvement of large pre-trained language models, prompt-based fine-tuning is shown to be effective on a variety of downstream tasks. Though many prompting methods have been investigated, it remains unknown which type of prompts are the most effective among three types of prompts (i.e., human-designed prompts, schema prompts and null prompts). In this work, we empirically compare the three types of prompts under both few-shot and fully-supervised settings. Our experimental results show that schema prompts are the most effective in general. Besides, the performance gaps tend to diminish when the scale of training data grows large.
MIAShield: Defending Membership Inference Attacks via Preemptive Exclusion of Members
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

In membership inference attacks (MIAs), an adversary observes the predictions of a model to determine whether a sample is part of the model's training data. Existing MIA defenses conceal the presence of a target sample through strong regularization, knowledge distillation, confidence masking, or differential privacy. We propose MIAShield, a new MIA defense based on preemptive exclusion of member samples instead of masking the presence of a member. The key insight in MIAShield is weakening the strong membership signal that stems from the presence of a target sample by preemptively excluding it at prediction time without compromising model utility. To that end, we design and evaluate a suite of preemptive exclusion oracles leveraging model-confidence, exact or approximate sample signature, and learning-based exclusion of member data points. To be practical, MIAShield splits a training data into disjoint subsets and trains each subset to build an ensemble of models. The disjointedness of subsets ensures that a target sample belongs to only one subset, which isolates the sample to facilitate the preemptive exclusion goal. We evaluate MIAShield on three benchmark image classification datasets. We show that MIAShield effectively mitigates membership inference (near random guess) for a wide range of MIAs, achieves far better privacy-utility trade-off compared with state-of-the-art defenses, and remains resilient against an adaptive adversary.